From March 9-19, New York’s Japan Society simmers nearly 50 years of yakuza (Japanese mafia) movies—a mainstay of Japanese cinema—in the Globus Film Series Hardest Men in Town: Yakuza Chronicles of Sin, Sex & Violence, featuring 15 of the genre’s sharpest selections.

In addition to acclaimed classics by directors Hideo Gosha (The Wolves) and Kinji Fukasaku (Cops vs. Thugs, Battles Without Honor and Humanity), the series includes lesser known titles and overlooked treasures by Seijun Suzuki (Youth of the Beast), Takashi Miike (Dead or Alive), Rokuro Mochizuki (A Yakuza In Love, Onibi: The Fire Within), and Academy Award winner Sydney Pollack (The Yakuza), as well as contemporary incarnations of the genre such as Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage. Among eight premieres, four will receive their first screening outside of Japan.

The fest ignites Wednesday (March 9) with a special introduction and live Q&A by celebrated filmmaker Paul Schrader for The Yakuza, Sydney Pollack’s overlooked 1970s gem starring Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura. The film was Schrader’s debut as a screenwriter (in collaboration with his brother Leonard and Chinatown scribe Robert Towne), and he would go on to pen the scripts for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and direct such diverse works as American Gigolo and Mishima, among others. Few films show more deference and respect to Japanese film culture than The Yakuza, which has been lauded as the most original introduction to its eponymous genre.